Week Thirty: The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

Director: William Wyler

Producer: Samuel Goldwyn

Writer: Robert E. Sherwood

Cinematography: Gregg Toland

Music: Hugo Friedhofer and Emil Newman

Starring: Fredric March (Al Stephenson), Dana Andrews (Fred Derry), Harold Russell (Homer Parish), Myrna Loy (Milly Stephenson), Teresa Wright (Peggy Stephenson), Virginia Mayo (Marie Derry), Cathy O’Donnell (Wilma Cameron), Hoagy Carmichael (Uncle Butch Engle)

Before You Watch the Movie
(First, make sure you have read the introduction to this series)

After World War II ended, the next steps were the massive demobilization of the American armed forces. Aside from a few career soldiers, the majority of those who fought in the war would be done with military service. In 1945, there were over 12.2 million serving in the American military, in just two years that number had dropped to just over 1.5 million. That meant that over 10.5 million veterans were returning home to a world that they may not have been ready for, and that certainly wasn’t ready for them.

In the mid-forties, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and similar mental disorders were not understood and acknowledged for what they really were. Instead, terms like “shell-shock” and “combat fatigue” were used – often as a pejorative – and it was a commonly held belief that some weakness or cowardice on the part of the sufferer was to blame for their issues. Even those returning veterans who didn’t suffer from some disorder often came home changed men and struggled to return to normal life. And that isn’t even mentioning those who suffered physical injuries. Additionally, many who served in the war entered the service as kids of seventeen or eighteen and returned in their early twenties as adults, completely lacking in the necessary training or schooling to make a living for themselves.  

One of those men returning from the war was director William Wyler, who before the war had been one of Hollywood’s most successful directors, having been nominated for five Best Director Oscars in seven years and winning one in 1942 – for Mrs. Miniver, which also won Best Picture. However, that would be the last film Wyler would make in Hollywood for four years: the forty-year-old Wyler joined up with the armed forces after Pearl Harbor and served in the European theater making two war documentaries. The most famous of these documentaries followed a bomber crew where Wyler and his crew flew on several actual bombing runs, braving enemy fire and sub-zero temperatures to capture the footage. Despite the obvious risks involved during the missions, Wyler suffered an injury from a more unexpected source: the tremendous and unrelenting noise created by the plane’s engines left Wyler almost completely deaf. For a director, who must hear the way lines are delivered by the actors, this was possibly a career-ending issue and there was a time when he felt he was never going to be able to direct again. However, with the help of a specially designed hearing aid, Wyler returned to Hollywood and made a movie that reflected not only his experiences coming back from war, but also those of millions of other ex-GIs.

In order to cover the most possible ground, The Best Years of Our Lives is intentionally a cross-section of all the major demographics of returning soldiers, covering their age range, branch of the military, and rank:

Platoon Sergeant Al Stephenson, a non-commissioned officer representing the army...

...he is slightly older and more affluent than the others.

Captain Fred Derry, a commissioned officer representing the Air Force...

...his is in middle of the three as far as age but comes from the poorest background.

Petty Officer, 2nd Class Homer Parrish, representing the Navy, he is the youngest and middle-class

The look of the movie is heavily influenced by cinematographer Gregg Toland, best known for his pioneering work in Citizen Kane and utilizing “deep focus” photography (that is, both the foreground and background are in focus) in his films. Toland had used the technique in films before Kane – including for Wyler, most notably in Wuthering Heights (1939) – and other directors had used deep focus in their films. Renoir often used it and we can see it going back as far as Erich von Stroheim’s Greed (1924). Still, there can be no doubt that Toland was the foremost cinematographer when it came to the use of deep focus photography and it can be seen all over The Best Years of Our Lives.

Deep focus: in the foreground Butch, Homer and Al are all in focus...

...but so is Fred, on the phone in the background.

Deep focus adds a vibrancy to the visuals...

...as well as adding a compelling depth to the scenes. 

Additionally, Wyler attempted to create a grounded, unglamorous looking film in which people looked and dressed like their social class would indicate. Wyler instructed his lead actors to go out to the local department store and buy their clothes there, on a budget and particular care was put into the designing of the sets, which were made to look like real-life 
locations, not sets. 

Both the drugstore and Butch's Place were built to mimic real life and not look like a set

There would be nothing more insincere than glamourous designer gowns and lavish locales in a film attempting to portray the real difficulties of the average returning veteran. The idea of The Best Years of Our Lives was for both returning soldiers and their friends and families to identify with the characters on the screen, something that would be considerably more difficult to do if those characters looked and dressed like movie stars, not regular folks.

The clothes of the characters, particularly the women, were meant to be as un-Hollywood as possible.

After You Watch the Movie (Spoilers Below)

For William Wyler, the story of The Best Years of Our Lives wasn’t just personal because he was a returning World War II veteran, it was much more than that. In fact, many of the film’s most memorable and important moments were taken directly from Wyler’s experiences. The dramatic scene in which Al walks down the hall to surprise Milly was inspired by the first time Wyler saw his wife upon his return. 

Wyler’s fear that he had lost his place in Hollywood while he was away can be seen in Fred’s struggles to find employment and the feeling that those who hadn’t gone away to war had passed him by. 

Also, Wyler’s experiences living with his deafness is reflected in Homer’s struggles, guilt, and frustration. 

Even Fred punching the man in the drugstore was taken from another of Wyler’s own experiences when he punched a man who made an anti-Semitic remark, an action that almost got the director court-martialed. 

Almost all writing, in one way or another, has something of the author’s own experiences in it, but with The Best Years of Our Lives, we have a director with no official writing credits to his name putting so much of himself into a film. In this, we see how the lines of authorship of a film are blurred. In general, it is most likely true that the director gets too much credit and the writer not enough, but we can also see how a director – even one that isn’t ever officially credited with writing for their films – can take a finished script and tailor it to their own desires, changing dialogue, adding scenes when needed, and most importantly putting their own personal stamp on the film. Even when filming the scene as written, directors can have a huge influence on the emotion and feel of a scene by how they film it. Directors like Alfred Hitchcock or Fritz Lang didn’t write their own screenplays, but they did work closely on the story and dialogue and most importantly they took the film and made it their own. No matter how many different writers they worked with, you can easily recognize a Hitchcock film, a Lang film, a John Ford Film, a Wyler film because ultimately it is the director that molds the film in their image. A different director, even another director that served during the war, would have made a completely different film than Wyler, even leaving aside the director’s signature style.

After spending so much time in bombers and fighter planes, Wyler had a special affection for airmen, evidenced by the fact that Fred gets the most in-depth storyline of the film. The climax of Fred’s journey comes when he finally faces the memories of combat that have been haunting his dreams. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Metropolis, and Sunrise were examples of how silent films expressed the mental anguish of characters visually without the use of dialogue or sound. In The Best Years of Our Lives, however, we hear Fred’s memories as he re-lives them, adding a new dimension to how the audience experiences the emotions of characters. 

After suffering from nightmares...

...Fred visits an airplane graveyard...

...where he relives his trauma in the nose of a B-17 like he flew...

...we hear the internalized audio of his memories and see the pained look on his face.

Even in the mid-forties, filmmakers were experimenting with new ways to utilize sound and create immersion and connection between the audience and the characters on the screen. Lady in the Lake (1947) for example was filmed almost entirely from the first-person perspective of the main character, meaning that the audience was seeing through his eyes. The resulting film doesn’t really work, but it speaks to how movies were moving in the direction of increasing engagement on the part of the audience, something that has become key to modern filmmaking. Today more than ever movies try to get audiences to not understand the action of the screen, but to feel it in a visceral fashion. Though the kinetic energy and massive wall of sound that comprises a Fast and Furious car chase may seem like the furthest thing from a movie like The Best Years of Our Lives, the concept is the same.   

Though Wyler was attempting to impart some of Fred’s traumatic memories with that scene, overall that is essentially the goal of The Best Years of Our Lives: to create empathy for an underrepresented and misunderstood group of people who otherwise wouldn’t have a voice of their own. This was not a new concept in Hollywood, which had a long tradition of making social conscious pictures that would shine a light on the plight of some group of people or other. This was a trend, however, that would begin to gain steam toward the end of the forties before exploding in the fifties and sixties when a more diverse portion of the population would begin to gain increased representation in movies, though there was still a long way to go. Even today, films like Black Panther and Crazy Rich Asians are proving that there is a large audience that has been underrepresented in movies and is now joyfully accepting an increased level of representation.

As an attempt to increase understanding and acceptance of returning veterans – especially those with mental disorders and physical disabilities – The Best Years of Our Lives couldn’t be more successful. It is an excellent example of empathetic filmmaking and powerful conjuring of emotions. Al reuniting with his family, Fred’s visit to the B-17 and the tear-inducing scene in which Wilma helps Homer get ready for bed, all put us in the place of a returning veteran and what they might face in such a way that we sympathize but more importantly learn about what struggles they might face. 

However, since it is made by an ex-GI like Wyler, The Best Years of Our Lives also only gives us a one-sided view of post-war America. As they moved further from the war and didn’t feel obligated to give such a rosy view of those involved, those involved in the making of movies began to examine the darker side of not only American’s involvement in the war but also those that served in the war. It is foolishness to pretend that all those who served during the War were heroic and that no unspeakable acts were committed by Americans in uniform. That is where film noir came in, to peak beneath the shiny veneer of proper American life that presented itself on the surface. That wasn’t the intention of The Best Years of Our Lives and isn’t a lesser film because of it, but there was a void that needed to be and was filled by other movies.   

See Also

The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress (1944) dir. William Wyler

Wyler’s tremendous documentary which he quite literally risked both life and limb – the temperature in the plane at altitude was so low at too long of exposure could cause the loss of body parts – to make. Still one of the best war-time documentaries made and influential in its footage of aerial bombing missions.

Let There Be Light (1946) dir. John Huston

Huston, who also served making films during the war, made this documentary about soldiers suffering from and getting treatment for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. A tremendously powerful film that everyone should watch at least once. That was a sentiment that the U.S. government disagreed with – apparently, they were afraid that showing the destruction wrought on the mind by war would not help with recruiting – and they suppressed the film, which wasn’t seen until 1981. It is now available for free to watch.

Beyond Glory (1948) dir. John Farrow

A fictional film that deals with a soldier who, after returning from war with partial amnesia and PTSD, has to deal with the guilt of causing the death of a fellow soldier and friend. A lesser known film that works when it doesn’t veer too heavily into pro-military propaganda. 
Five Came Back (2017) dir. Laurent Bouzereau
Documentary series (based on Mark Harris' tremendous book of the same name) on Netflix about Wyler, John Ford, John Huston, Frank Capra, and George Stevens - five of Hollywood's biggest directors - serving during World War II.

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